Developing Speaking Skills

Techniques to encourage interaction

• Pair-work.
• Group-work.
• Plenty of controlled and guided practice before fluency activities.
• Create a desire and need to communicate.
• Change classroom dynamics.

• Careful planning.
• With certain activities you may need to allow students time to think about what they are going to say.

Using group work to promote interaction

• Group work may increase amount of learner talk in a limited period of time
• It lowers the inhibition of learners who are unwilling to speak in front of the full class
• Group work means the teacher cannot supervise all learner speech but they learn from each other and develop collaboration skills.

Facilitate speaking activities: easy language

• Base the activity on easy language:
• The level of language needed for a discussion should be lower than that used in intensive language-learning activities in the same class.
• It should be easily recalled and produced by the participants, so that they can speak fluently with the minimum of hesitation.
• It is good idea to teach or review essential vocabulary before the activity starts.

More suggestions to facilitate speaking

• Make a careful choice of topic and task to stimulate interest. On the whole, the clearer the purpose of the discussion the more motivated participants will be.
• Give instruction or training in discussion skills. If the task is based on group discussion then include instructions about participation when introducing it. For example, tell learners to make sure that everyone in the group contributes to the discussion; appoint a chairperson to each group who will regulate participation.
• Give students incentives to use the target language and not resort to their mother tongue.

Characteristics of effective speaking activities (1/2)

• Learners talk a lot. As much as possible of the period of time allotted to the activity is in fact occupied by learner talk. This may seem obvious, but often most time is taken up with teacher talk or pauses.
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